Betrayal Page 4

  During the 1970s the churches of the Rhineland, Baden, and Brandenburg tried to rid themselves of centuries of anti-Jewish theology and forge a new affirmation of Judaism's continued vitality and legitimacy. It is worth noting that those efforts began among German churches influenced by Calvinist more than by Lutheran traditions. Individual pastors, such as Benjamin Locher of the Rhineland, played crucial roles in formulating a 1960 declaration by the German Protestant Church, or Evangelische Kirche Deutsch land (EKD), and an even more influential 1980 declaration by the Church of the Rhineland. Locher insisted that the Holocaust was not one of many Christian concerns, but the central problem of Christian theology. "Something is false in our faith. There must be something false at its heart that we as Christian teachers or practitioners are teaching or representing.""' One of today's groundbreaking Protestant theologians in Germany, Friedrich Wilhelm Marquardt, has attempted to formulate a Christology that would affirm Jesus as the embodiment of the Jewish faith, not as a teacher who sought Judaism's destruction. Marquardt's efforts begin with the question, "What meaning does it have for us to speak of God after Auschwitz?""

  Despite these tendencies, the situation in today's German theological community is mixed. Numerous theologians, pastors, and laypeople continue to promulgate the outdated and denigrating portrayals of Judaism they have inherited. A recent bestseller by journalist Jorg Zink suggests that if Jesus instead of Moses had taught the Ten Commandments, they would have been formulated as loving suggestions, rather than apodictic laws." His argument recapitulates the stereotype of Jewish legalism in contrast to Christian love, as well as the idea that the God of the Old Testament is not the same as the God of the New Testament. A German feminist theologian, Christa Mulack, maintains that Jewish adherence to divine commandments is analogous to Nazi obedience to the criminal orders of their superiors. She describes the Holocaust as the triumph of Jewish patriarchal ethics over the feminist morality taught by Jesus, thus characterizing Jews as victims of their own religion.''

  Other theologians are more subtle. Jurgen Moltmann, Germany's most famous contemporary Protestant theologian, does not emphasize Christian responsibility for antisemitism but instead places Christians with Jews as victims of persecution: "There is only one people of hope in the world, the one people of God. It is the one people of God, the people of the old and new covenant. Because Jews and Christians have a common hope for 'the one who is to come,' the messiah, they are on the way together to God's kingdom and future. That is why they are persecuted together and suffer together. When Israel is led to the slaughter, the church goes with her-if things are as they should be.""

  In actuality, Jews and Christians are not "one people of hope in the world." Since the time of Jesus, they have no shared history, but rather two different histories, which often were rent apart by Christian persecution of Jews. The notion that "when Israel is led to the slaughter" the church ought to accompany her is troubling. Most of us would contend that neither Jews nor Christians should ever be slaughtered. Most disturbing, however, is Moltmann's inability to concede that the major reason for the murder of Jews during the course of Western history has been Christian anti-Judaism. His senti mental vision of what should be diverts attention from the appalling image of what has been. Instead of declaring Christian readiness to be killed with Jews, Moltmann could honestly acknowledge the widespread Christian share of responsibility for past slaughter.

  At the same time, leading theologians in contemporary Germany are making important efforts to repudiate the kind of anti-Jewish tradition exemplified even by respected figures such as Harnack and Bultmann. Institutes for Jewish studies are found at most of the leading German universities, and increasing numbers of students of Christian theology are writing dissertations to expose and repudiate aspects of Christian anti-Judaism. Few theologians outside Germany have devoted as much energy and passion to creating a Christianity that will affirm Judaism, and few Christian theology students are as engaged in studying Hebrew and Judaism as are German students. Many German theologians today view the Holocaust and the centuries of Christian anti-Judaism that flourished in Germany as the central problems to be addressed if Christianity is to have a future in Germany, and if Germany is to have moral standing in the community of nations.

  ?rman Protestant theology stood at the center of Christian thought in the lineteenth century. This was the tradition that sought the "historical Jesus." It was the tradition that tried to bring theology into the modern world, tried to use the rational tools of the Enlightenment, tried to apply a historical, critical analysis to the biblical record. Theologians in Britain and America learned to read German, bought German books, and in many cases traveled to Germany to study this modern theological tradition. Germany had also been the birthplace of Protestantism and, of course, the home of Martin Luther.

  This same Germany that nurtured Protestant theology also raised up Adolf Hitler and perpetrated the Holocaust. Is there a connection? Hitler was not born a German, but an Austrian. He was not raised a Protestant, but a Catholic. After sloughing off his early religious training, he was not a Christian, but an advocate of his own worldview of German racial destiny. However, the Germany that Hitler led remained 95 percent Christian and 55 percent Protestant. Most of the Germans who welcomed Hitler's rise to power-who saw Jews increasingly deprived of their rights, who witnessed the burning synagogues and broken glass of Kris tallnacirt, who watched the removal of Jews from German soil, who listened to rumors of the annihilation of Jews in Poland and Russia-were self-professed Christians. Most of the actual perpetrators-members of the SS and of the reserve police battalions, the shooters and the scientists, those who ran the trains and those who ran the camps-received religious training in the Protestant or Catholic tradition.

  Did their religious training and beliefs have an impact on their behavior? We know there was a conspicuous absence of voices denouncing Hitler's anti Jewish policies and only rarely was there a refusal to participate in them. Except for a few individuals, neither active Christians nor other Germans rose up at any stage to protest the mistreatment of Jews. This failure has often been attributed to fear: Common people had to cooperate or they would be shot. Scholarship has increasingly shown, however, that the Nazi police state was less oppressive, and the willingness of "ordinary men" to commit brutalities much greater, than we had imagined.'

  This chapter assumes that one piece of the puzzle of German behavior under Hitler lies in an assessment of religious beliefs. What were these people taught in Sunday school or in their religious education? What attitudes prevailed in the Protestant mind? In particular, who were the Protestant theologians who formulated the response of the churches to the political questions of the 1920s and 1930s; who taught the pastors and religious educators of Germany, and what did they teach? The German theological legacy from the nineteenth century has an impressive reputation, but how did it play out in Protestant teachings in the twentieth?

  We will consider three men whose childhoods spanned the turn of the century and whose theological education took place in the comfortable years prior to the outbreak of World War I. Paul Althaus (1888-1966), Emanuel Hirsch (1888-1972) and Gerhard Kittel (1888-1948) established themselves among the brightest of their generation. Each rose to prominence in the 1920s, and each became a dominant figure in German theology by the 1930s. These men not only inherited a theological tradition, they consciously reshaped it for the crisis years in which they lived, a crisis beginning with German participation and loss in World War I and culminating in the Hitler years and the Holocaust. The Protestant theology they inherited and shaped allowed them to endorse enthusiastically the rise of Hitler and to accept without complaint the removal of Jews from German life.

  Paul Llthaus

  As professor of systematic theology at Erlangen University from 1925 and as president of the Luther Society from 1926, Paul Althaus occupied a prominent place among Luther scholars until deep into the postwar period. He wrote prolifically, a
nd his books remained standard texts in theological education, both in Germany and America, through the 1950s and 1960s. Althaus practiced a political theology, trying to relate the teachings of Luther and of the Christian tradition to the political circumstances in Germany after World War 1. He summarized his reaction to the rise of Hitler with the words, "Our Protestant churches have greeted the turning point of 1933 as a gift and miracle of God."2

  It is important to note Althaus's language. He does not merely accept Hitler as an adequate leader or as the lesser of two or more evils. Rather, he claims God's intervention in German affairs and proclaims Hitler's rise a "miracle." He also claims to speak for the Protestant churches as a whole, citing several church statements in corroboration, and he adds, "So we take the turning point of this year as grace from God's hand. He has saved us from the abyss and out of hopelessness. He has given us--or so we hope-a new day of life."'

  It seems safe to conclude that Althaus really did speak for most Protestant Christians in Germany in 1933. It was commonplace for theologians, pastors, and church officials to oppose democracy and the openness of the Weimar Republic, which they associated with national weakness and moral decadence. A very few leaders in the church stood on the left as advocates of religious socialism, but most were conservative nationalists. Although today we decry Hitler's regime as a police state, Althaus appreciated Nazi "law and order," which he contrasted to the "bleeding heart" liberalism of the Weimar Republic: "The dissolution of criminal law into social therapy and pedagogy, which was already far along in development, has reached an end: punishment shall again be taken seriously as retribution.... It [the Nazi state] has destroyed the terrible irresponsibility of the parliament and allows us to see what responsibility means. It sweeps away the filth of corruption. It restrains the powers of decomposition in literature and the theater. It calls and educates our Volk to a strong new will for community, to a 'socialism of the deed,' which means the strong carry the burdens of the weak."'

  Instead of rejecting the totalitarian nature of Hitler's rule, Althaus defended it: "But a state which knows itself as servant to the life of its Volk will not rob the other associations and orders in the of their selfreliant, spontaneous life. It will embody totalitarianism-not as an inflexible system, but it will call forth the free spirit of totality, i.e., the spirit of responsibility for all forms and spheres of life in the presence of the duty to be Volk."' Confident that Hitler's totalitarianism would prove a blessing, he went on to prescribe how Christians should respond: "As a Christian church we bestow no political report card. But in knowledge of the mandate of the state, we may express our thanks to God and our joyful preparedness when we see a state which after a time of depletion and paralysis has broken through to a knowledge of sovereign authority, of service to the life of the Volk, of responsibility for the freedom, legitimacy, and justice of volkisch existence.... We Christians know ourselves bound by God's will to the promotion of National Socialism, so that all members and ranks of the Volk will be ready for service and sacrifice to one another.""

  Althaus loved his fellow Germans, provided they were members of the mysterious Volk. Did he also love his fellow Germans who happened to be Jewish? On the positive side, he never denied Christian connections to Judaism, despite the "embarrassment" of this connection under a racially antisemitic regime. He defended the Old Testament, he stated that Jews remained God's chosen people, and he acknowledged the seemingly obvious fact that Jesus was a Jew.7

  In 1933, as some within the Protestant church advocated the ecclesial implementation of the Aryan Paragraph, which would remove so-called nonAryan clergy from the church rosters, Althaus responded that such individuals already in office should not be removed unless specific circumstances warranted." However, this defense of non-Aryan Christians proved very limited. When Rudolf Bultmann and the Marburg theological faculty opposed any application of the Aryan Paragraph to church affairs, stating that race was entirely irrelevant to Christian categories, the Erlangen faculty asked Althaus and Werner Elert to draft a reply. They acknowledged the "threat" of emancipated Jewry to the German nation and the right of the German state to defend itself, concluding that "the church must therefore demand of its Jewish Christians that they hold themselves back from official positions.""

  In fact, Althaus's continued emphasis on the German Volk, a villkisch church, and volkisch theology carried with it an implicit racism. He sometimes made this explicit: "Among the factors which determine and make up a Volk, the community of blood or race has become decisively important for us Germans.... It has to do with a specific, closed, blood relationship. Race is not already Volk, the biological unity is not already historical unity. But the unity of race in a significant sense and its protection is an essential condition for the formation and preservation of the Volk.""' On those occasions when Althaus avoided racial categories, his cultural antisemitism emerged as no less virulent: "It does not have to do with Jewish hatred-one can reach an agreement directly with serious Jews on this point; it does not have to do with blood or with the religious beliefs of Judaism. But it does involve the threat of a quite specific disintegrated and demoralizing urban spirituality, whose representative now is primarily the Jewish Volk.""

  Between 1933 and 1938, Althaus placed his theological reputation squarely within the National Socialist camp, both in terms of politics in general and in terms of the racist ideal of the German Volk. Then a change seemed to occur. Although he never retracted earlier writings, after 1938 Althaus refrained from further explicit endorsement of the regime. This may well have reflected his aversion to the brutality of Kristallnacht, a night of bloodshed and burning synagogues in November 1938. Althaus's son, though only three years old at the time, reports the family story that his father was incensed by Kristallnacht and predicted that God's judgment would fall on the German people in due course. Whether or not this is true, Althaus never meaningfully protested the mistreatment of Jews, and he proved unable to rise above the cultural antisemitism of his milieu. When his perplexed son questioned him on the subject in the mid-1950s, he merely said, "You have not experienced the

  Emanuel Kirsch

  Emanuel Hirsch-who taught church history, New Testament, and systematic theology at Gottingen University-shared a friendship and much else with Paul Althaus. They had been friendly rivals as young theologians. They shared an intense love for Germany and the German Volk and a conservative, antimodern critique of Germany's problems.'' In the first years of the Nazi regime, they may have been the two most important theologians to parlay these attitudes into unequivocal support for Hitler. Hirsch did so in an open letter of April 1932, advocating Hitler's election." He also published his views soon after Hitler's rise, echoing Althaus's "gift and miracle of God" statement: "All of us who stand in the present moment of our Volk experience it as a sunrise of divine goodness after endless dark years of wrath and misery.""

  The main difference between these two friends is that Hirsch shared all of Althaus's pro-Nazi positions, but with less restraint. For example, Hirsch chose to join the Nazi Party and to become a "supporting member" of theSS.'^ As dean of his theological faculty, he worked to promote National Socialism in hiring and curriculum policies, and he did not hesitate to denounce colleagues and students whose support for the regime might be suspect.'' Hirsch's support for the regime, unlike Althaus's, never seemed to wavernot after 1938, possibly not even after 1945." In all of these ways, Hirsch's attachment to the Nazi regime was more intense and less restrained. He also had a more important reputation as a theologian.

  In 1945 Hirsch departed the official faculty at Gottingen, using a medical retirement to slip past the threat of removal by "denazification." He then remained one of the few faculty members never allowed to return to the university, partly due to the technicalities of his medical retirement and partly to the unwillingness of the postwar theological faculty to forgive his open and unrestrained support for the Hitler regime." Although Hirsch published prolifically in the po
stwar years, including a definitive, multivolume treatment of Soren Kierkegaard, he received no invitations to university events, and students could come to him only by invitation to his private sessions. In Germany today the "Hirsch Circle"-a core of loyal followers who sat at his feet in those private seminars in the 1950s and 1960s, many of whom are now professors of theology-believe their mentor has been unjustly pilloried and ignored. They hope to restore his reputation and significance, some going so far as to call him the greatest theologian of this century. Implicit in the argument of the Hirsch Circle is the belief that his brilliance as a theologian has been unfairly clouded by a mistaken political stance."'